One does not usually think of the words “China” and “history of the American conservative movement” as belonging to the same logically structured sentence. Yet, in this elegantly constructed volume, Joyce Mao shows how it was precisely by rearticulating the relationship between the United States and China that the conservative New Right emerged in the immediate postwar period and eventually developed “into the most enduring political movement of the twentieth century” (p. 2). Mao illustrates how, in 1949, the Communist victory in China was deployed by the Republican right as a blatant example of the failure of liberal foreign policy—Korea and Vietnam would bring further proof—and how the focus on Asia allowed them to pirouette away from their previous (and newly untenable) position of strict isolationism. Attention to China made it possible for the conservative right to claim for themselves a foreign policy of limited but assertive interventionism—distinct from the dominant bipartisan position—and a modern internationalist legitimacy. Yet, Mao argues, China also had a domestic function for conservatives, who connected the liberal failures in Asia with abuses in executive power, betrayal of constitutional limits, and spending run amok. To this, they opposed a vision of increased military spending and assertiveness abroad combined with budget restraint and constitutional originalism at home. Finally, the call for “Asia first” functioned as a rallying point for disparate militant groups, united by their strident anticommunism and support for “Free China,” especially in the growing electorate of the sunbelt states.

Mao traces how the meanings of China evolved and shifted in the discourse of Asia Firsters from the early Cold War to the Reagan administration, from an emotional and moral imperative that framed the United States as responsible for China's fate, to more rationally argued concerns that depicted the defense of Taiwan as essential for American global security. Yet, while these meanings shifted, she argues, the centrality and usefulness of China remained unchanged. The book follows this evolution through a series of chapters each loosely centered on one historical figure, emblematic of the different and protean faces of the “Asia First” idea. Senator Robert Taft, in chapter 1, embodies the shift from isolationism to interventionism in the immediate postwar period, while businessman and activist Alfred Kohlberg anchors Mao's analysis of the China Lobby and its connection with McCarthyism in chapter 2. Senator William Knowland, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, and Barry Goldwater are the subjects of chapters 3 to 5. The book ends with the normalization of US-PRC relationships under President Carter. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the political evolution that Asia First describes—or at least the most fascinating for this China scholar—is that the “China” of the New Right had very little to do with practical policies towards and an actual understanding of the situation in the PRC and in Taiwan. Even in the case of people like Goldwater and Kohlberg, who had a seemingly sincere emotional devotion for the cause of Taiwan, Asia Firsters never really formulated a coherent China policy and probably never really believed in the possibility of changing the situation in Asia. Whether they saw it as a weak ally to be saved or as a “yellow peril breeding a billion children” (p. 149), China remained largely a projection of the conservative right's hopes, fears, and ideas about America itself. From the 1950s to the 1970s, China was a product of what Mao calls “American Orientalism.”

Asia First will be an enlightening read for anyone interested in twentieth-century US history (Mao's field of specialization), but it should also be read widely among scholars of Asia. The construction of China as a focus of politics was never a separated affair; rather it affected how China was understood in general. While Mao does not go into it, we know that geopolitical concerns and political struggles were constitutive of Asian studies in the United States during the Cold War. And if there is a flaw in the book, it is that the author does not draw comparisons beyond the conservative right. The forms of “American Orientalism” that framed China for the right's political consumption and utilization were shared beyond the confines of the conservative movement. In the quotes Mao enlists to support her argument, one hear echoes of arguments made by people on the other side of the political spectrum, the Modernization Theorists who populated the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

In sum, Asia First offers illuminating insights into the role of China as a factor in global and domestic US politics but also into the way “China” functioned as a blank sheet of paper where US (and Taiwanese) politicians, businessmen, and maybe even scholars, could write whatever suited their political needs.